Introduction — MEDLINE is the premier database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). It contains over 12 million records of journal articles in all areas of the life sciences, with particular emphasis on biomedicine. MEDLINE records are created by NLM and collaborating partners.

The articles indexed in MEDLINE were published in more than 4,600 international journals, published in over 30 languages. Source publications for MEDLINE cover basic biomedical research and the clinical sciences. Major subject areas include nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, pharmacy, allied health, and pre-clinical sciences. MEDLINE also covers life sciences that are vital to biomedical practitioners, researchers, and educators, including some aspects of biology, environmental science, marine biology, plant and animal science as well as biophysics and chemistry.

In MEDLINE you can:

• Search by Topic, MeSH terms, Authors, Addresses, and Source Titles.
• Automatically map Topic terms to MeSH terms.
• Link to records in other Thomson Scientific hosted products, including Web of Science® and Current Contents Connect® (subscriptions required).
• Refine your search results by mining and ranking data values from various fields by using the Results Analysis feature.
• Set up citation alerts (subscription to Web of Science required).